Sawàt dii kaa! That's Thai for "hello"! :o) I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas - I certainly have. How I've been spending my time since I last wrote have been extremely varied...
I attended a meeting the day after I arrived with those team members who'll be involved in teaching the conversational English program that's starting next week. These courses run every 2-3 months and there are 8 sessions over a period of two and a half weeks - two of the sessions using Bible stories. I'll be helping teach the advanced class (apparently having been engaging in conversational English for roughly 30 years automatically qualifies me to teach it at an advanced level!).
A highlight so far has been a trip to a Karen hilltribe village about 2 hours south of Chiang Mai with the Tilley's. One of the ladies who works at the team's bakery invited us to the Christmas celebrations at her husband's village. The scenery was stunning, the people were wonderfully warm and hospitable, and it was well off the tourist trail - some of these villages have tour groups coming through almost every day, but we were told that this particular village has only 3-4 groups of Farangs (foreigners) visit per year! In the afternoon, were invited into the home of an old couple who were the first ones to move to that place. They had grown up in a village higher up in the hills, but when they became Christians early in their marriage they were rejected by their families and had to leave. There are now around 80 adults living in the village, plus a whole lot of kids, and all of them are Christians.
The Sunday before Christmas I went to church with the Tilley's, and it was a wonderful feeling to be able to sing worship songs with a whole lot of believers again. It had only been a few weeks, but having just come from such a spiritual desert it made me feel quite emotional! On Christmas Day most of the team plus a few random friends went to the team leader's house for lunch. We had all been asked to cook something we would normally have for Christmas at home, so we had quite a feast!
Yesterday I was taken on a trip to the team's farm about 40 minutes' drive away. It's quite small at the moment, but as with the coffee shop and the bakery, it's a project that's intended to turn a profit in a few years' time and enable local Thai pastors and church planters to be independent of financial support from overseas. Our main task while we were at the farm was building a haystack, which was actually quite fun but when it was finished we had to admit it quite obviously looked like it was built by a bunch of Farangs!
This morning was another special outing - accompanying the team on one of their wheelchair distribution days, which had been scheduled to coincide with an annual celebration at the local hospital in support/recognition of disabled people. It was quite a production, with speeches and performances and a marching band of kids dressed in traditional hilltribe costumes... but we had to get into the wheelchair work before all of that had finished. The wheelchairs are second hand ones donated in affluent countries, reconditioned, and sent over here by the container load. A shipment had come in recently so there were heaps of them at the hospital - a couple of hundred, I think. But the difficulty is finding one that's the right size and specifications to meet each patient's needs. Sometimes a fair bit of tinkering has to be done to try and make them just right!
In between all of that there have been a couple of trips to the Night Bazaar, which is nothing short of a shopper's paradise. I should warn you all not to expect any presents for the next year or so that aren't labelled "Made in Thailand"!!
No comments:
Post a Comment